zuzu said:Is it at all possible that this is a temporary name used for patenting purposes? .
No, it's worse than that!! Only cultivar names, no matter how ridiculous and against naming guidelines, can be patented - the patent lasts 20 years, then expires. Until expiration, no vegetative propagation is allowed without hybridizer approval (and royalties). After expiration, anyone can vegetatively propagate the plant under that weird cultivar name.
Registered/trademarked names, however, last FOREVER (the trade mark is for 10 years, renewable indefinitely). So somebody in 20 years can sell a rose called 'WEKbepmey' (and even trademark it as My Boat's Come In) but NOT sell it as Strike It Rich. We then have the exact same plant but with 2 different names - and that's supposedly already happened. The whole issue is actually much more complicated:
Tony Avent, Plant Delights Nursery, has very good, detailed rant on the whole U.S. plant marketing practice:
http://www.plantdelights.com/T...
The cultivar name always goes in single quotes, but the trademarked name never gets single quotes and has the TM or R in a circle after it.
It's now such a common practice in so many genera that I agree 100% that if a plant has a tradename, that's the name that should be used for alphabetizing, not the cultivar. Of course, if a plant cultivar gets a different trade name in another country, then it's really a mess.
Caveat: Don't know how any other country does patents or trademarks.
